The only person solo to the North Pole by the hardest route

Entrepreneur

Pen founded Geo Mission Ltd after leading the successful Catlin Arctic Survey 2009.

Geo Mission is a pioneering environmental sponsorship organisation. It creates and manages partnerships between businesses and natural science research programmes addressing the major environmental questions of our time. It also designs and delivers the resources and facilities in the field for the scientists.

The emerging environmental sponsorship sector offers proven and powerful marketing and communications opportunities for businesses and brands, notably in support of the sustainability agenda.

As the impacts of our activities on Earth become more evident, it has never been more important for the global community to understand how nature’s interconnected systems and processes, and the life they support, works. This improved understanding will enable us to manage our relationship with the planet’s resources more sustainably.

Scientific exploration of the natural world generates dramatic, multi-faceted, and valuable content, which can be directed to shift the perceptions and responses of a sponsor’s stakeholders, in alignment with strategic objectives.

The Polar Travel Company

With a steady stream of enquirers approaching Pen after his early-day polar expedition talks asking how they too could do something in the polar regions, he realised a market existed for a niche tour operator.

In 1995 he set up The Polar Travel Company, which offered guided wildlife and adventure tours to the Arctic and Antarctic. It was also the first to offer professionally guided expedition services on the Arctic Ocean sea ice. Pen’s vision was to make it possible for people from all backgrounds to realise their polar ambitions.

In 1997 it organised what later became known as the McVitie’s Penguin Polar Relay, the first all-women expedition to the North Pole, involving 20 British women with no previous polar experience, operating in five teams of four accompanied by two professional Canadian women guides – one of the most logistically complex expeditions ever to have been organised on the Arctic Ocean.

Over the years, led by the interests of its clients, the company increasingly specialised in organising sledge-hauling expeditions to the world’s ultimate extremities – the North and South Poles. Guided expeditions took many forms – individuals, private teams, charity fund-raising projects and made-for-TV programmes – but all were delivered with a passion to ensure each person had the richest possible experience.

Over the winter of 2003/04 The Polar Travel Company organised, and Pen led, an expedition on a new 1,200km route from Antarctica’s continental coast to the South Pole, accompanied by Simon Murray (63). In association with The Times, Simon Murray’s expedition raised £280,000 to restore the polar archive of the Royal Geographical Society.